Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality

This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies. What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The chapters in this book together and separately demonstrate that, in order to understand contemporary spirituality, the analytical lenses of gender and power are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between established religions and contemporary spirituality: the two sometimes overlap, and at other times spirituality distances itself from religion while reproducing some of its underlying interpretative frameworks. This book does not take the discourses of spiritual practitioners for granted, yet recognizes the reflexivity of spiritual practitioners and the reciprocal relationship between spirituality and disciplines such as anthropology. The ethnographic descriptions of lived spirituality included in this volume span a wide range of countries, from Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands to Mexico and Israel.

"An important and original contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of gender and power in alternative forms of spirituality." – Sabina Magliocco, California State University, Northridge, USA"Central to spirituality is a desire for personal liberation, we hear again and again. Yet this rich collection of ethnographies demonstrates that it is deeply shaped by performances of gender and power." – Dick Houtman, Erasmus University, Netherlands"I enjoyed the writing throughout the collection and highly recommend it for graduate seminars...All readers will have greater knowledge of and appreciation for the pulse and variety of the prevalent but under-studied new religious communities." Mary L. Keller, University of Wyoming, USA"Written by scholars at varying stages of their careers, this book offers an accessible and engaging collection of essays that foreground the interplay between gender, power, spirituality, and social context. I recommend this book to those interested in current developments and research in the field of spirituality." - Sonya Sharma, Kingston University, UK"This volume offers an accessible insight into the complex renegotiation of gender and power among contemporary spiritual movements in the European context, and generates many questions for further research in this area." - C.A.M. van den Berg, Amsterdam, in Journal of Empirical Theology

Anna Fedele is a Research Fellow of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris and at the Lisbon University Institute. She has recently been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the intersections between religion and spirituality and the importance of gender in contemporary spirituality. Fedele also coordinated a book with Ruy Blanes entitled Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religiosity: Anthropological Reflections (forthcoming).Kim Knibbe is a Lecturer at the Department of Theology and Religious studies at the University of Groningen. Netherlands. The past three years she was based at the Anthropology Department of the VU University, Amsterdam and coordinated an international research project on Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal churches in Europe.